Working on towers and masts can be dangerous. Manufacturers’ recommendations are clear: work at heights should not be performed when wind speeds exceed 5 m/s. Safety harnesses or mountaineering harnesses are helpful in everyday work—they significantly increase safety, though at the expense of comfort. Changing positions on a mast is particularly cumbersome: every step requires re-adjusting the lanyard, which in practice leads even experienced technicians to forego using safety equipment between successive work positions.
Fall arrest systems, which are growing in popularity, offer a solution to this problem. They work by using a carriage that is attached to a harness and moves along a guide rail. The carriage moves freely up and down, and in the event of a sudden jerk (e.g., if a service technician loses contact with the structure), a self-locking mechanism prevents further descent.
The guides in these types of systems usually take the form of a rope—as in Assecuro’s SKC-Stop solution—or steel rails (e.g., Tractel, Soll/Glideloc, and Faba systems).
Most fall protection systems are used in conjunction with ladders, serving as a complement to them—though this is not a requirement. AluPro offers its own Securo solution, which is compatible with SKC-Stop trolleys and can be mounted even on masts without ladders.
The Securo system consists of a certified 8-mm-diameter stainless steel cable, a tensioner (turnbuckle), an upper bracket mounted on the flanges of the top mast segment, and a lower bracket—depending on the version, mounted on the two bottom rungs of the ladder or directly on the mast’s edge pipe (if no ladder is present). The kit also includes polyurethane rope guides.